The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19)

by Philip McCutchan

“Check?” I asked.

  “Check,” she said wonderingly.

  I looked again at the portrait. There was no doubt in my mind. I turned the medallion over to look at the reverse. That woodland scene, the river, the small, stone-built cottage between the trees. That could have been a Yorkshire scene, somewhere perhaps in Wharfedale, or come to that Wensleydale itself. A love in bachelor Neskuke’s life? Maybe. But what stood out a mile was this: coincidence does have a very long arm but not as long as this. That hairy man in France had been in contact with Neskuke before he’d become a corpse in a Turkish ship’s funnel. Neskuke could even have been incarcerated in that same French cellar, and probably not so long ago.

  I went right through the farmhouse looking for points of further interest but found none. The bedrooms were big except for the servants’ quarters in the attic, but as shabby as the downstairs rooms. And the house felt cold, damp, unlived-in. It was too big to be given life by the sole presence of the widow Sillitoe. Downstairs again I went into what had obviously been the Captain’s study. A brown room, panelled, with bookshelves filling two walls, and gun cupboards either side of the big fireplace. A large desk, still kept polished. On it a globe and a small revolving bookcase with reference books handy. Whitaker’s, Roget’s Thesaurus, handbooks on birds, that sort of thing. There were photographs of warships long gone from the Navy List, Hood, Revenge, Vindictive, no doubt from the Captain’s days as a midshipman, and some more recent ones. A sextant stood on a small table in a corner by a long window. The atmosphere was that of a sailor’s room, a cabin aboard a ship.

  But there was nothing else, anywhere in that house, that struck me as germane to Neskuke.

  It was time to get the police in. We drove along to the Wensleydale Heifer and I used the telephone. At that time of the evening, the nearest police presence was at Richmond.

  *

  There was a plain-clothes man, there was the forensic team, there was a uniformed sergeant and constable. The sergeant was a bucolic man who looked as though he’d have been happier tending sheep on the fells. He also looked as though he wished to arrest us, on mere suspicion of having entered on a burgling mission and then committed murder, his mental processes not giving him pause to wonder why, if this was so, we’d reported in instead of vanishing as fast as possible. His boss, the plain-clothes man, put him in his place.

  “6D2, Ronnie.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Remind me to tell you sometime,” the plain-clothes man, whose name was Bottomley, said with a touch of impatience. They got to work, forensic doing it strictly by the book, very conscientiously. I knew the book too: record name and address of deceased, as if they didn’t know it already, record details of the identifying person – I couldn’t be sure the body was that of Mrs Sillitoe, though my inspection hadn’t left me with any real doubt – and any others around at the time. Put on rubber gloves; take care not to disturb body and surroundings, but I’d already done some disturbance to make sure the body had no life in it; photographs, diagrams, specimens; examination, note air and rectal temperatures; cover body with plastic sheet; take a final look round before moving body to mortuary. The fingerprint section went to immense pains, especially on the milk churn, which I thought was a waste of time and effort since it had obviously merely fallen on her and the murderer would have been highly unlikely to have touched it before or after the event. Also, despite the hardness of the ground – no rain for a long time, the plain-clothes man said – they were again conscientious: footwear marks, tyre marks, fur, feathers and fibres in the dairy itself, bone and hair on the corpse plus dust, dirty debris, blood and body fluids. Bottomley confirmed that there had not been rape. I didn’t think there had been, I said.

  “Nothing like making sure, sir.” He gave me a gimlet sort of look. “Now, sir, what about you and the young lady?”

  “What about us?” I asked.

  “Are you, for instance, remaining in the vicinity?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to report to my HQ.”

  “It’s getting late,” Inspector Bottomley said. “You can be put up at the Heifer I don’t doubt.”

  He seemed to want me to; his wishes didn’t really carry any weight with 6D2 but they were a kind of excuse. I’d been on the go a long while, all the way from Clermont Ferrand with a bad though improving head. I glanced at Felicity and she gave a slight nod and a smile.

  “All right, Mr Bottomley,” I said. “Off first thing in the morning, though.”

  “Aye,” he said, with an inflexion that told me that when morning came he’d dream up something to keep me in situ. I was, after all, a prime witness, not to the act, but to the result of it. “Kindly don’t go till you’ve been in touch, then, sir.”

  “All right,” I said. Bottomley and his men watched as we drove away for the Wensleydale Heifer, not leaving the scene until we had done so. Earlier, Bottomley had asked me why 6D2 was interested enough to send me up, just at the moment when murder had been done. I said that had nothing to do with the murder itself, and anyway my lips were sealed. I baffled him a little with bullshit about security and Whitehall and never once did I mention the name of Neskuke.

  *

  We had a drink and dinner in the Wensleydale Heifer and very good it was, cordon bleu. I was glad to be possessor of a generous expense account and of a boss who never queried it, and slapped down the accounts boys if ever they moaned about it. The meal finished, I said, “Bottomley didn’t leave a police guard once the body had been removed. For my own reasons I didn’t query that.”

  “You want another look around?”

  “Not exactly that,” I said.

  Felicity smiled. “Just as well, unless you mean to break and enter.” The police had locked up before we left, and the keys were by now in the nick somewhere. I told Felicity that wasn’t the idea: my earlier search had been enough and I didn’t believe I’d missed anything.

  “So what is it?”

  “Interested parties,” I said. “Someone could come back – ”

  “The dog to its vomit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea,” she asked, “why they should?”

  I said it was just a hunch, a precaution. She said I’d be wasting my time and comfort. We already knew, now, that Neskuke was or had been involved in a more positive way than just as a fumed corpse. I answered that we still didn’t know the whys and wherefores. Her response to that was that someone lurking around the scene of the murder wouldn’t be likely to be helpful in that quest. I said you never could tell. Thus we argued, until I told her to shut up, and opened my grip to get out the Chief’s Special that I’d got from the Focal House armoury before leaving for my flat early that morning, ex-Cherbourg.

  She said she would come with me if I was that obstinate. I said she wouldn’t. She didn’t, though she made something of a fuss. Felicity had guts but I didn’t mean to see them spilled in West Witton. I said that I would give it three hours and if I wasn’t back by a little over that time she could ring Focal House. The duty officer there would cope even if he had to dig Max out of bed.

  *

  I left the lights of the Wensleydale Heifer and went on foot towards the Sillitoe house, through the darkness, which was thick, no moon or stars coming through heavy cloud cover. I believed rain was around: there was the feel of it in the air. Maybe the farmers would be glad of it, good Yorkshire rain at full belt to bring on the grass to feed the sheep that were their livelihood in the dales.

  I had a torch, a powerful one, but I didn’t use it even though I could hardly see the roadside and stumbled once or twice into a stone wall. Now and again a car passed and its headlights gave me my bearings. I went beneath an avenue of big trees, only just aware of them, knowing from memory they were there.

  I reached the house. Everything was very quiet, just the occasional cry from some night bird. All my senses were on the alert: somehow I smelled danger, a feeling that I was not alone. Away behind the house, Wensleyda
le stretched down to the Ure and very faintly I began to hear the water tumbling over the rocks and stones in its path – not much water in fact, owing to the recent lack of rain. On the far side of the Ure, Castle Bolton was invisible, though I saw the odd headlight making along the road from Aysgarth to Leyburn. Castle Bolton, where once Mary Queen of Scots had been imprisoned: my tingling imagination could hear her sobs as she wept for a lost kingdom. Today, Castle Bolton was a restaurant …

  As I watched and waited in the cover of the trees and thick, untended undergrowth, the rain started. For perhaps a half-minute it came gently, like tears. Then it got into its stride as only northern rain can, fast and sudden, and accompanied now by a rising wind that blew leaves against my face and whipped out my clothing. I was drenched through in seconds, never mind the trees’ cover. Water streamed; from the gateway a miniature river ran over my shoes: the hard ground of the farmyard would take time to soften and absorb. When it did, it would become a quagmire. I wondered how Captain Sillitoe had coped with mud: you don’t get much of that at sea. Holystoned quarterdecks were a lot tidier. I wondered how Sillitoe had got on with Robert Alexander Neskuke, his brother-in-law. I wondered how much he’d known about Neskuke. I wondered many things, some of them irrelevant, like had Felicity gone to bed and was she missing me … I was in fact dead tired by now, recent events more than catching up with me, and I let my alertness fade a little involuntarily as I huddled up against my tree in that devastating downpour. The weather was making up for time lost.

  Then, quite sharply through the rain, I heard a sound. It was a door being blown to on a gust of wind, a good loud bang. I believed it came from the dairy, the scene of the crime. I stiffened, and inched out from cover to get a better view. The dairy door had been firmly secured by the police, with a padlock. No wind would have disturbed that.

  I saw nothing through the rain and the darkness. I heard no footsteps, but I had my revolver ready. The man was virtually on top of me before I became aware of him. I think we became aware of each other in the same split-second. I ordered him to lift his hands, and with a muffled sound of surprise he did so. He stood there, still as a statue, a shape in the night. He didn’t utter. I asked who he was and what he was doing, but there was no response.

  “Turn round,” I said. “Turn round, and walk ahead of me. Along the road, to the right. If you increase the distance by a single inch, I’ll drop you.”

  He still didn’t speak but he obeyed orders. I shoved the muzzle of the heavy revolver into his backbone and he moved, keeping it slow. I flicked on the torch now in my left hand and showed up the way ahead. From the back, I saw nothing beyond a green anorak with the hood pulled over the head. Then I heard something behind me: a vehicle starting up, no doubt from behind the house. A moment later headlights came on, silhouetting the two of us, and the vehicle came on in low gear, making quite a racket. I ordered the man ahead of me to move right, pronto, into the trees. What he did was to stop dead. After that there was some pretty fancy driving and good car-handling. The front bumper took me behind a knee and threw me. Violently, I somersaulted into the undergrowth. When I got to my feet, the guns were on me.

  An accented voice said, “At last, Commander Shaw.” I recognised the voice before I saw who the man was. My old enemy, Louis Leclerc, alias Jean Bois, crew member of the Zonguldak in Shoreham way down south.

  I was ordered into the car, into the back, where there was another man. Leclerc got in beside me; both he and the other man had guns, automatics. Mine had gone. The driver stayed in his seat and took the car out of the farmyard, onto the A684. He turned to the left, towards Aysgarth, and drove fast. I had no need to remind myself that in days past Louis Leclerc had sworn to kill me, or that he’d tried to fix it in Shoreham Docks so recently. Nevertheless, he seemed to think I needed a reminder.

  He said, “It is to happen soon now. There is not very far to go.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “There is a place in Swaledale. It is called the Buttertubs.”

  “I see,” I said.

  You know the Buttertubs, Commander Shaw?” The voice was polite, conversational, like a Yorkshireman telling a southerner about his beloved county, anxious to impress a city slicker. I did know the Buttertubs: great, deep circular pits in the ground, with jagged pinnacles of rock at the bottom a hundred feet below, holes formed by erosion over vast numbers of centuries, set in what was arguably the bleakest, remotest part of the old North Riding, above Swaledale and Thwaite Common, opposite a great prominence of land named, inappropriately, Lovely Seat. Much visited by tourists in the season – in daylight. By night, nothing moved but the fellside sheep. At this time of the year a body could remain a very long time without discovery, and I knew that body was the word: no one could survive a drop into the Buttertubs. Or not for long. If one was unlucky one just might not die straight away. One could linger, pierced like a butterfly in a killing-bottle, on one of those pointed pinnacles of rock. Death would then come slowly.

  I answered the question. “Yes, I know the Buttertubs, Leclerc.”

  “Then you know all.”

  “All?”

  There was a light laugh. “All you ever need to know, or have time to know.”

  I said, “Well, that’s not entirely so.”

  “H’m? You are curious?”

  I said of course I was. It was my job to be curious, however late in life. There were loose ends, I said, and I asked about Neskuke.

  “Neskuke?”

  “Neskuke,” I repeated. “The body in the funnel, remember?”

  There was a pause, then a harsh laugh. It really didn’t matter now, I hadn’t long to live, that laugh said. Leclerc went on, “I remember, yes.”

  “And Alphonse Freyard. You paid him to kill me. It didn’t come off. Not in my case.”

  “But now it will. And I have no fears that I shall be charged with it.”

  “Because you’ve got your route out of the UK all nicely planned.”

  “That is so, yes.”

  The car passed the road leading down to Grassington through Bishopdale. We were not far off Aysgarth now. After a while, I said, “Let’s get back to Neskuke, Leclerc. I take it he was trying to make a getaway.”

  “I do not know.”

  “You know all right, Leclerc. He’d got hold of some information that he meant to pass on. You and your friends … Neskuke had to be stopped. In the end – ”

  “In the end he died from misadventure, stupidly stowing away in a ship’s funnel, a dangerous thing to do.”

  “Very dangerous,” I agreed. The car went on, fast, passing through the village of Aysgarth, heading on west for Bainbridge. “But to me it stands out a mile: Neskuke was on to something.”

  Leclerc said indifferently, “If you like, yes, perhaps he was.”

  “But you’re not going to let on what it was.”

  “No.”

  I laughed. “In case I get away. You’re not all that confident, are you, Leclerc?”

  “You have been known to get away before, Commander Shaw. I am confident that you will not this time. But I take no chances.”

  “Have it your own way,” I said. After that there was no more conversation. Leclerc hummed a tune to himself, a French one. The man on my left shifted restlessly, his body moving against me. The gun wavered a little: if I could get a grip on it … but Leclerc was fully alert and I wouldn’t have had much chance. Nevertheless, if I was to die anyway, it might as well be fighting back in the hope of taking one of them with me. But the man on the left was more on the ball than I’d thought. He seemed to sense the way my mind was going, and he uttered what were clearly threats, though I didn’t get the language. Just to make sure, Leclerc interpreted. I would get a bullet where it would disable but not kill. They had to have their fun at the Buttertubs. Leclerc really hated my guts. I’d stolen too many marches on him in past years, which, as he’d suggested himself, was why he was being so careful about not releasing any information.
Maybe when I was impaled on a rock pinnacle, he’d shout down and tell me. The funny thing, if there was any humour around at all, was that I knew already. Or was pretty certain I did after that talk with Max.

  Through Bainbridge, along the twisting road beneath highset communities invisible from the lower level of the road, tiny clusters such as Stalling Busk and Burtersett and Thornton Rust, below the lake of Semer Water, like a Scottish lochan transferred to the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, we came into the outskirts of Hawes, windswept and wet tonight, very bleak. In Hawes the car turned to the right, took a twisting, climbing road and then a left turn followed by another right, after which the climb grew steeper. I knew the terrain: it was not far now to the Buttertubs, high up on the fells. The visibility as we climbed higher was very poor; the headlights, where they didn’t beam off into the blankness over the long drops, seemed to meet a kind of brick wall that reflected them back. It wasn’t mist; there was too much blustering wind for that. It was sheer rain, teeming down in sheets, so hard that when it hit the tarmac it bounced back up again, drenching the car’s chassis from below, hissing like a million snakes.

  As we reached the highest point of the pass, the headlights showed a half broken-down fence on the left of the road. That meant we had arrived. In Yorkshire, walkers and potholers take their chance, as do the sheep. Danger points are not very well protected: you’re supposed to be able to look after yourself. The car pulled just off the road, and stopped. I looked around: no light anywhere. It was very late – the early hours of next morning, in fact, by the illuminated clock on the dashboard. No one would be around, not in the Buttertubs Pass. We hadn’t passed a car, in fact, since Bainbridge many miles away.

  The man on my left got out and told me to do the same. I got out into that tearing wind; it almost blew me off my feet, and I steadied myself on the ramshackle fence. The nearest of the lethal pits was just a matter of feet away from me and the others.

  Leclerc lifted his gun and aimed it at me. I didn’t think he’d shoot me. That would be too quick. It was just a warning not to try to get away. I knew I couldn’t get far before they got me.